A Rain Of Rites By Jayanta Mahapatra - Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Opening with the first poem named Dawn, It continues on With the poems, As thus, Village, Old Places, These Women, A Missing Person, Samsara, Five Indian Songs, A Rain of Rites, A Rain, The Exile, Listening, Summer, Ceremony, Main Temple Street, Puri, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street, The Sentence, A Twilight Poem, Appearances, Myth, Four Rain PoemsA Dead Boy, Moving, Silence, Dawn at Puri

To the poems, Listening to a Prayer, Sunburst, On the Bank of the Ganges, Girl Shopping in a department Store, A Tree, Indian Summer Poem, The Ruins, Evening, Idyll, The Bare Arms in Packing Cases, Ikons, I Hear My Fingers Sadly Touching an Ivory Key, Somewhere, My Men, Hunger, An Old Country, The Desert under the Breath, Hands, Of Armour, This Stranger, My Daughter, India, The Landscape of Return, The Face, The Faces, The Tattooed Taste, Now When We Think of Compromise.

It’s a poem about a poem, An attempt to circulate and tell aboutNot easily available Indian English poemsAnd you don’t have an access to the poet, You cannot have his poems, Find out the address, mail to him, Post the letter and procure the books fromIf in the know ofThe whereaboutsOf the poet hidden from the world, Working in absence of recognitionWhile the men of culture and traditionLike not to highlight themselves, Presenting the bio-data or the c.v.. A poet neither of rains nor of rituals, He is of a guilty consciousnessMarking the malignant purpose in the nun’s eye, In the dark room, a woman searching her reflection, This is the samsara, A business of man, gods and priestsAnd the worshippers, At land’s distance, there lies a mouldy village, Resting rawly against the hills, The charred ruins of sun, The long-haired priest of Kali Putting the plucked and stolen jasminesOf his villa, Whose door never closed he as per his father’s instructions, As for to be put into the goddess’ morning eyes.

In the poem, Myth, the poet catches the incantationOf the drift of years and the chants, the long years as the incense, Man as worshipper coming and going, The same old and brassy bells laden with memories tolledAnd the scene recurring againWith the same meditational sadhu in sadhnaTelling of the sanctumLying on the fringes of Annapurna and DhaualgiriOr elsewhere pointing toBut he dares not enter into the templeAs myth keeps changing the track of, Shifting from hand to hand, eye to eye, The offered, crushed and dried leaves and flowersSmiling at him, Maybe it that the bearded and saffron-man may askIf he a Hindoo or not.

A poet so imagistic, he just keeps playing with words, Frolicking with Thoughts, ideas and imagesComing as converted imagery, Pure and distilled, But unexplainable, Just as the scenes and sights continue to be, Art-pieces seen on the canvas, How to describe them, How to penetrate into something very artistic?